Hebrew: Elohim, Eloheinu. Am I correct

I had a conversation with a friend of mine who is Jewish. He's not practicing, and he speaks only a smidge of Hebrew. I said the words "Elohim Eloheinu." And he said that "eloheinu was not a Hebrew word. I ardued that it was and that I thought that Elohim Eloheinu" meant "God is our God." He said I was wrong and then insulted me for not being Jewish and claiming to know something of Hebrew (He was only play insulting me of course) Anyway, I quickly did some wiki research and came up with the following and sent it to him. Can anybody tell me if I hit the nail on the head with this?

On our conversation about Hebrew. Shema Yisrael:
"Shema Yisrael" are the first two words of a section of the Torah that is a centerpiece of the morning and evening Jewish prayer services. The first verse of deuteronomy 6:4. "Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one". (Hebrew: שְׁמַע יִשְׂרָאֵל יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵינוּ יְהוָה אֶחָד) (romanization: Shema Yisra'el YHWH Eloheinu YHWH Eḥad). Notice the word "Eloheinu"
The word "Elohim" is plural for "eloah". It is the usual word for "god" in the Torah. referring with singular verbs both to the one God of Israel, and also in a few examples to other singular pagan deities. So "Elohim is a generic term for the word "God". It does not necessarily refer to the one god YHWH.
The Shema Yisrael "Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheinu Adonai Eḥad" translates as "Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One".
The word "Eloheinu" - "Our god"
So "Elohim Eloheinu" would mean "God is our god".
Eloheinu is indeed a Hebrew word. And might I add has a beautiful connotation.

What a coincidence. I recently searched for the etymology of Elohim because I was interested in its connection to the word El [meaning God in the Canaanite religion]

El is the name by which the supreme Canaanite deity is known. This is also a name by which God is called in the Old Testament -- El, the God (Elohim) of Israel (el elohe yisrael: Gen. 33:20). In most prose it occures more often with an adjunct: El Elyon (the most high God, Gen. 14:18), El Shaddai (traditionally, God Almighty, Gen. 17:1), El Hai (The living God, Josh. 3:10), and very commonly in the plural of majesty, Elohim. In Hebrew poetry El is much more frequent, where it stands quite often without any adjunct (Ps. 18:31, 33, 48; 68:21; Job 8:3).

The word El is a generic name for "god" in Northwest Semitic (Hebrew and Ugaritic) and as such it is also used in the Old Testament for heathen deities or idols (Ex. 34:14; Ps. 81:10; Is. 44:10). The original generic term was 'ilum; dropping the mimation and the nominative case ending (u) becomes 'el in Hebrew. It was almost certainly an adjectival formation (intransitive participle) from the root "to be strong, powerful" ('wl), meaning "The Strong (or Powerful) One."

In Canaanite paganism the el, par excelence, was the head of the panthon. As the god, El was, in accordance with the general irrationality and moral grossness of Canaanite religion, a dim and shadowy figure, who, Philo says, had three wives, who were also his sisters, and who could readily step down from his eminence and become the hero of sordid escapades and crimes. Philo portrays El as a bloody tyrant, whose acts terrified all the other gods, and who dethroned his own father, murdered his favorite son, and decapitated his own daughter. The Ugaritic poems add the crime of uncontrolled lust to his morbid character and the description of his seduction of two unnamed women is the most sensuous in ANE literature (much of Ugaritic literature is R rated at best).

Despite all this, El was considered the exalted "father of years" (abu shanima), the "father of man" (abu adami), and "father bull", that is, the progenitor of the gods, tacitly likened to a bull in the midst of a herd of cows. Like Homer's Zeus, he was "the father of men and gods."

The word "Jew" is actually a pretty recent word for the people worshipping Yhwh. Note that there is no record of that word before the eighteenth century when Jesus was referred to as a Jew in the New Testament. Previous versions of the New Testament did not contain the word Jew.

The meaning of the word "Ioudaios" in the Greek Bible is not the same as the meaning of the word Jew. In the Bible "Ioudaios" refers to a resident of Judea [or "Ioudaia"].

I had a conversation with a friend of mine who is Jewish. He's not practicing, and he speaks only a smidge of Hebrew. I said the words "Elohim Eloheinu."

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El oheinu is two words. Your translator didn't notice the space between them in the original Hebrew.

There aren't many five-syllable Hebrew words in the first place, so it almost had to be a compound anyway.

I have to drive to the airport so I don't have the time to look up oheinu. I'll leave that as an exercise for you folks. And please find someone who is at least passingly familiar with Hebrew to do it. None of you are. If you can't find somebody and you're desperate, just Google el oheinu in quotes with the space and you'll get a hundred hits in Hebrew. One of them will surely offer a translation.

I have an interlinear Shema (Hebrew, transliterated into English, and translated into English) taped onto my wall (as well as an interlinear Bible), and the word "eloheinu" is a Hebrew word that means "our god".

The text (Deuteronomy 6:4-9) of the Shema reads "yahweh eloheinu", meaning "Yahweh is our god". However, some Jews see "yahweh" (which is the name of their God) as too sacred to pronounce, so they prefer to use "elohim" (meaning "God"), "adonai" (typically translated as "Lord") or even "hashem" (which simply means "name" as an oblique substitute for the name of God).

So what does Yahweh mean or it is strictly a name. I seem to recall - Provider?

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There are several versions of the origins of the name Yahweh

One is from the Midian tradition:

"In its earliest attestations the name Yah refers to the moon as satellite of the earth. Yah then becomes conceptualised as a lunar deity, iconographically anthropomorphic but whose manifestations, from the hieroglyphic evidence, can include the crescent of the new moon, the ibis and the falcon- comparable to the other moon deities, Thoth and Khonsu. It is probable that contact with Middle Eastern states in Palestine, Syria and Babylonia was instrumental in the development of Yah as a deity. Certainly the zenith of Yah's popularity lay in the period following the Middle Kingdom when immigration from the Levant was high and princes from Palestine, knoiwn as the Hyksos, rulers, dominated Egypt. These foreigners may well have looked for a lunardeity analogous to the Akkadian moon-god Sin who had an important temple at Harran in north Syria. Strangely, it is with the Theban royal family eventually responsible for the expulsion of these alien rulers that there is a difinite inclination for names involving the mood-god Yah. The daughter of Seqenenre Tao I (Dynasty XVII) is Yah-hotep ('Yah is content'). The founder of Dynasty XVIII was called Yahmose ('Yah is born') and the same element is in the nameo f his wife Yahmose-Nefertari. Most likely the Middle Eastern deity who gave the stimulus to the adoption of Yah is the influence behind the name Kamose, the brother of Yahmose, who began the final thrust against the Hyksos domination. Kamose ('the bull is born') might be the Egyptian equivalent of the epithet applied to Sin describing him as a 'young bull... with strong horns' (i.e. the tips of the crescent moon). This imagery would be totally compatible with the Egyptian concept of the pharaoh as an invinvible bull. In the tomb of Tuthmosis III (Dynasty XVII), the pharaoh whose campaigns took him to the banks of the Euphrates river, there is a scene where the king is accompanied by his mother and three queens, including Sit-Yah 'daughter of the moon-god'. Traces of his cult beyond this period are sporadic."

Yah, was the name of the god of the Midians into which Moses supposedly married by marrying the daughter of a Midian priest. Yah was also the name of the desert god worshipped by the Bedoins. It is likely this name is the same one Canaanites applied to Yamm as Yaw or Yawu.​

From the Ugarit tradition:

Professor Cohn noted that some scholars suspected that Ugaritic Yaw might be the prototype for Yahweh:

"It is becoming ever more difficult to say with any confidence when, where and how the Israelites first came to know the god Yahweh. It may be that, as Exodus says, he was originally a Midianite god, introduced into the land of Canaan by immigrants from Egypt; or he may have started as a minor member of the Canaanite pantheon...Originally El was the supreme god for Israelites as he had always been for Canaanites. Even if one discounts the pronouncement of El in the Baal cycle,'The name of my son is Yaw'- the import of which is still being debated- one cannot ignore a passage in the Bible which shows Yahweh as subordinate to El. Deuteronomy 32:8 tells how when El Elyon, i.e., El the Most High, parcelled out the nations between his sons, Yahweh received Israel as his portion." (pp.131-132. "Yahweh and the Jerusalem Monarchy." Norman Cohn. Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come, The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith. New Haven and London. Yale University Press. 1993)

​

The Bible tends to support the Ugarit tradition:

That Yahweh was originally a son of El is attested by a document (KTU 1.1 IV 14) from Ugarit, a Palestinian site occupied by neighbors of Israel. It reads sm . bny . yw . ilt, which translates as "The name of the son of god, Yahweh."

This status as the foremost of the sons of El is remembered in the Song of Moses, one of the oldest of the Hebrew scriptures, in Deuteronomy 32:8-9: "When the Elyon [another name of El] apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the gods [i.e., each god controlled one nation of people]; Yahweh's own portion was his people, Jacob [i.e., the nation of [Israel] his allotted share."

Psalm 82:1: Elohim has taken his place in the assembly of EL, in the midst of the elohim He holds judgment.

It seems like the cut off point between the pantheon and Yhwh as the solo god is the Book of Ezra, following the Persian invasion of Babylon. Ezra was a courtier of the then Persian king and according to his book, preached monotheism to the then polytheistic Judeans. The Persians being monotheists at the time, probably encouraged that sort of thing.

This would also explain why Herodotus who preceded Ezra had never heard of Yhwh, inspite of the Temple being 500 years old by his time.

It is instructive to look at who did not mention these Judeans in history. In the mid 5th c. BC Herodotus traveled the region and mentioned no Judeans nor anyone who could have been a Judean. He mentions the Palestinians (not Phillistines -- no one knows how that corruption got into the Septuagint) seven times as well as listing people who practiced circumcision. No Judeans there. In the late 4th c. Alexander conquers the region. There is no mention of any Judeans in the inventories of his conquests or his allies or those who simply surrendered. There is no mention of Judea or Jerusalem.

El oheinu is two words. Your translator didn't notice the space between them in the original Hebrew.

There aren't many five-syllable Hebrew words in the first place, so it almost had to be a compound anyway.

I have to drive to the airport so I don't have the time to look up oheinu. I'll leave that as an exercise for you folks. And please find someone who is at least passingly familiar with Hebrew to do it. None of you are. If you can't find somebody and you're desperate, just Google el oheinu in quotes with the space and you'll get a hundred hits in Hebrew. One of them will surely offer a translation.

I had a conversation with a friend of mine who is Jewish. He's not practicing, and he speaks only a smidge of Hebrew. I said the words "Elohim Eloheinu." And he said that "eloheinu was not a Hebrew word. I ardued that it was and that I thought that Elohim Eloheinu" meant "God is our God." He said I was wrong and then insulted me for not being Jewish and claiming to know something of Hebrew (He was only play insulting me of course) Anyway, I quickly did some wiki research and came up with the following and sent it to him. Can anybody tell me if I hit the nail on the head with this?

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נו "nu" is a post-fix in Hebrew which refers to "our" (masculine / feminine). The root of the word is "אל" which means "Supreme one / deity" etc etc. Just as a side note; the word אלה is pronounced similar to the Arabic word for God, "Allah". In both cases (I believe) it means the one God which provides, although in modern Hebrew means "my oath". And אלהי would be "my God".

This is where it gets a little confusing in conjugating the Hebrew into English.
אלהים "elohim" is technically plural. It refers to a different kind of plural conjugation which doesn't exist in English. It means "The God which we all have a unique relationship with which is different for each of us".

אלהינו "eloheynu" is also plural. It's read more as..."The God which we all mutually have a relationship with."

In short, I would say you were more correct than him. However, due to the nature of the English language (or my shortcomings therein) the exact distinction between the two is not intuitive.

I have an interlinear Shema (Hebrew, transliterated into English, and translated into English) taped onto my wall (as well as an interlinear Bible), and the word "eloheinu" is a Hebrew word that means "our god".

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But it is two words.

El means "god".

[*]It's a truncated form of eloh, which has already been discussed in this thread.[*]Eloh is a cognate of Arabic allah.[*]Vowels are very ephemeral in the Afro-Asiatic language family because they are not phonemic. (I.e., they are irrelevant to the meaning of the word.) So if you find two words in two Semitic languages with the same consonants, the probability is very high that they are the same word.[*]Truncation is a common phenomenon in Hebrew, especially in the construction of compound words and names. The -el at the end of myriad Hebrew names such as Daniel, Israel, Michael, Immanuel, Ezekiel, is an abbreviation of eloh.​

Oheinu is the first-person plural possessive pronoun, "our."

[*]Hebrew syntax places modifiers after the nouns they modify, even possessive pronouns.[*]The Romance languages do this with adjectives (casa blanca, "white house"), but not with possessive pronouns (mi madre, "my mother") except for emphasis (¿Madre mía, dónde estás? "Mother of mine, where are you?")[*]Hebrew is more inflexible in this matter.​

The rules for transliterating Hebrew into the Roman alphabet are a little imprecise.

[*]This is especially true when choosing to separate two words by a space or a hyphen.[*]Therefore, you will see this romanized both ways: el oheinu and el-oheinu. The first transliterator regards them as two independent words; the second regards them as the formation of a compound.[*]Hebrew, especially Classical Hebrew, does not have as many punctuation marks to choose from as the modern European languages, so transliterators sometimes get very creative. We have the same problem in Chinese.​

Again, I will humbly defer to the superior scholarship of anyone who is actually fluent in Classical or Modern Israeli Hebrew, but so far no one with that qualification has shown up.

I recently encountered the Modern Israeli Hebrew phrase Yisrael beitenu in a news article. It was being shouted during a demonstration against the possibility of giving any of Palestine back to the Palestinians.

The translation is "Israel is our home." Since beit means "house" or "home" (Classical Hebrew bayith, generally rendered by scholars as beth, particularly as the name of the letter ב representing the B phoneme), clearly -einu is a suffix expressing belonging.

Elohim is a plural word that usually means 'Gods' but has also been rendered 'Shining Ones' or 'Bright People'. Similar singular words include El-Elyon and El-Shaddai.

In Genesis "God created" in Hebrew is "Elohim bara".

"bara" has 3 principal meaning:

i) = "to create"; but, strangely, this meaning is only used with the term "elohim" (or it's equivalent) as the subject'
ii) = "to clear ground" (for agriculture) including "felling timber"'
iii) = "fatten oneself" - a meaning which cannot be ignored because, in paronomastic terms, it could have associations with both i) and ii)

Professor Cohn noted that some scholars suspected that Ugaritic Yaw might be the prototype for Yahweh:

"It is becoming ever more difficult to say with any confidence when, where and how the Israelites first came to know the god Yahweh. It may be that, as Exodus says, he was originally a Midianite god, introduced into the land of Canaan by immigrants from Egypt; or he may have started as a minor member of the Canaanite pantheon...Originally El was the supreme god for Israelites as he had always been for Canaanites. Even if one discounts the pronouncement of El in the Baal cycle,'The name of my son is Yaw'- the import of which is still being debated- one cannot ignore a passage in the Bible which shows Yahweh as subordinate to El. Deuteronomy 32:8 tells how when El Elyon, i.e., El the Most High, parcelled out the nations between his sons, Yahweh received Israel as his portion." (pp.131-132. "Yahweh and the Jerusalem Monarchy." Norman Cohn. Cosmos, Chaos and the World to Come, The Ancient Roots of Apocalyptic Faith. New Haven and London. Yale University Press. 1993)​

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First, this translation is overly paraphrastic. It should rather be that he (the Most High) "divided the boundaries of the nations according to the number of the sons of god (=El)", though Israel did become the portion of Yhwh. But this does not necessarily mean that Yhwh was one of the "sons of god" (which in the Bible is usually a term for what we call angels, ie non-divine supernatural beings that are servants of Yhwh). Indeed, if one considers that Elyon is frequently used in the Bible as a name or title for Yhwh himself, it might be that both words speak of the same agent here, too. So one can quite plausibly read the text to say that while Yhwh gave each nation to an angel, he took charge of Israel himself. This interpretation is supported by other passages, such as Daniel 7-12, where mention is made of angelic "princes" ruling over the nations.

Second, one should note that the version quoted is the one represented by the Septuagint, ie a Greek translation of original Hebrew documents. The Hebrew manuscript tradition for the Old Testament (the so-called Massoretic Text) has "sons of Israel" in place of "sons of god". Which removes the possibly polytheistic reference altogether. Which version is the older, we can't say with any confidence.

The Bible tends to support the Ugarit tradition:

That Yahweh was originally a son of El is attested by a document (KTU 1.1 IV 14) from Ugarit, a Palestinian site occupied by neighbors of Israel. It reads sm . bny . yw . ilt, which translates as "The name of the son of god, Yahweh."​

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I don't follow that vocalization. "Yw" reads "Yaw", or the like, not Yahweh.

This status as the foremost of the sons of El is remembered in the Song of Moses, one of the oldest of the Hebrew scriptures, in Deuteronomy 32:8-9: "When the Elyon [another name of El] apportioned the nations, when he divided humankind, he fixed the boundaries of the peoples according to the number of the gods [i.e., each god controlled one nation of people]; Yahweh's own portion was his people, Jacob [i.e., the nation of [Israel] his allotted share."

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See above. And in Hebrew it doesn't say gods (elohim), but sons of god.

Psalm 82:1: Elohim has taken his place in the assembly of EL, in the midst of the elohim He holds judgment.

Psalm 89:6: For who in the skies can be compared to Yahweh, who among the sons of EL is like Yahweh,

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El in the Bible is never used as a proper name, though it does appear so in the Ugarit writings and elsewhere. It means simply "god" in a general sense, just like in Arabic Allah isn't a name, but a simple noun. It's practically a synonym to elohim, just like he other main form of the word, eloah. Presenting it as another god than Yhwh is disingenious at best.

Honestly, I'm very unimpressed with these sources. I didn't read the bulk of the first one, but from the general gist I did get it that his MO seems to be to pick mythological and biblical sources out of context and force analogies between them. It doesn't help that he also mangles them in the process -- for example, his description of the legend of Ishtar's (Inanna's) descent into the underworld is fragmentary at best.

The second, of course, endorses Immanuel Velikovsky. To anyone mildly familiar with the scholarship of ancient mythology, I shouldn't have to say more than that.

It seems like the cut off point between the pantheon and Yhwh as the solo god is the Book of Ezra, following the Persian invasion of Babylon. Ezra was a courtier of the then Persian king and according to his book, preached monotheism to the then polytheistic Judeans. The Persians being monotheists at the time, probably encouraged that sort of thing.

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The Persians were not monotheists. What they were was Zoroastrians, which faith was dualist if not polytheist at the time (it's very hard to figure out the specifics, since we have no contemporary sources on that religion, but only much later writings).

When the Hebrew religion became monotheist is something of an open question, but in my personal reckoning we see at least the beginnings of it rather earlier in the Bible than Ezra. We can look, for example, at the apparently monotheistic campaign of King Josiah of Judah in the late 7th century.

Another unscholarly source, but this one commendably short, so I can comment in some more detail on its shortcomings. My general impression is first of all that of its partiality to all things Persian. It then proceeds to make a number of bizarre and unsupported claims. Since when was marrying foreign women a favored Israelite/Judaic practice? It's condemned throughout the Old Testament, from Genesis to, erhm, Nehemiah. As for translating the "Book of the Law", this would be for the sake of Aramaic speakers who didn't know Hebrew. Where he gets it that the Jews of the day didn't understand Aramaic, I have no idea. Equally bizarre are his claims about the Judaic sects of New Testament times. The word pharisees derives from Hebrew perushim, which means "set apart". The sadduccees, by contrast, were the Temple priesthood elite, not any kind of popular movement at all, or numerous. Most Jews belonged to neither of the sects, however.

This would also explain why Herodotus who preceded Ezra had never heard of Yhwh, inspite of the Temple being 500 years old by his time.

And yet another unscholarly source. Rhetorical question, has this guy ever even read a critical Bible commentary? Bizarre claims like the Bible being written originally in Greek and there never being such a thing as a Hebrew language instantly disqualify him from any serious consideration.

So what does Yahweh mean or it is strictly a name. I seem to recall - Provider?

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That is still very much under debate. From the explanation of the name in Exodus 3, some want it to be something akin to "The Causer To Be", ie a creator god, and this is what sounds most reasonable to me. But there are numerous other theories on the hitory and etymology of the name (some quoted here already), and I won't claim with any certainty I'm right.

Incidentally, the Bible never mentions a "Yahweh". All it says is Yhwh -- the vowels are a hypothetical reconstruction by modern etymologists. Even the Jews themselves don't know for certain how the word was really supposed to be pronounced.

Not that I wish to attack anyone, but I would seriously question the scholarship in a lot of that.

The Bible tends to support the Ugarit tradition:

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:roflmao:

Most scholars accept that the Bible has very little to do with scholarship. I'm not sure there is any evidence that there was a Hebrew Bible, to begin with. The only direct evidence seems to be a Pseudepigrapha in the dead sea scrolls and an archaeologist who falsifies information to fit the Zionist narrative. So, basing your etymology on that kind of information seems to be quite contentious.

Most scholars accept that the Bible has very little to do with scholarship. I'm not sure there is any evidence that there was a Hebrew Bible, to begin with. The only direct evidence seems to be a Pseudepigrapha in the dead sea scrolls and an archaeologist who falsifies information to fit the Zionist narrative. So, basing your etymology on that kind of information seems to be quite contentious.

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You aren't sure there was a Hebrew Bible?? There is one today. We have writings from it that are dated as before 0 AD by both paleographic methods and radiocarbon. (The Dead Sea Scrolls.)

If we don't accept the evidence for that, we shouldn't accept any evidence of Greek or Roman writings or history either, since every manuscript on those is younger than that -- copies of copies of copies.

But I must ask -- if you don't think there was a Hebrew Bible, how do you think we can determine anything about its god? All the sources you quoted made use of the Bible, to be sure, though not sensibly so IMHO.

The Pseudepigrapha in the dead sea scrolls do not constitute evidence of a Hebrew Bible preceding the Greek one because the Spetuagint is older than all current Hebrew renderings. As the letter of Aristeas has been proved a forgery, its contents have no academic value except as an example of faking history.

Yigal, who has custody of the DSS, has already admitted to falsifying evidence at Masada where he pretended pig bones were Jewish martyrs. Since he was one of the founding fathers of Israel and in fact, a military officer who led the crusades against the natives [aka nakba] his objectivity is suspect

Do you have any independent non-Zionist related evidence of a Hebrew bible?

But I must ask -- if you don't think there was a Hebrew Bible, how do you think we can determine anything about its god? All the sources you quoted made use of the Bible, to be sure, though not sensibly so IMHO.

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Etymology and myth are two different subjects. Regardless of the date of the Jewish God, there is a precedent for the name. As I've outlined, etymologically, it dates back to the Ugarit peoples and their known deity El, with his son Yahwah whose mother/wife Ashareth was one of a pantheon.